Abstract

A from-the-trenches narrative about how the fastest e-commerce website in India was built. Starring React, Redux, Webpack, and a whole lot of discipline.

Outline

Earlier this year, the folks at Aditya Birla Online Fashion commisioned a rewrite of their web front-end from scratch. The goal of the rewrite was to improve page speed – and hence conversion rates – on mobile devices. The first stage of the rewrite was carried out over a period of three months and, on launch day, the load times for the product listing pages on https://www.abof.com were the lowest among all the major e-commerce websites in India, even on the cheapest white-label Android devices on flaky 3G/2G connections.

My talk is a from-the-trenches narrative about how the Alaris Prime[1] and ActiveSphere[2] teams accomplished this feat, going into detail about our technology choices, build tooling, processes, and testing methodologies.

Along the way, I will touch on the key factors that affect web performance, the state of the front-end ecosystem, ReactJS and its ecosystem, ServiceWorkers and progressive web applications, and the importance of build tooling and automation while building front-end applications.

Building performant web applications isn’t hard, but it requires discipline. My goal is to decompose the philosophy and thought processes that lead to great webapps into a set of guidelines that tech teams can follow to replicate what we did at abof in their own workplaces.